Archive for the ‘La Cucaracha’ Category

This strip reminds me of the time I spent following professional wrestling in the early 1990s. Those were also recession years, and the country’s economic hardships were reflected in the ring. I have strong memories of Money, Inc., a villainous tag team comprised of the Million Dollar Man and Irwin R. Schyster (or I.R.S. for short). This hated duo bullied and cheated their way to championship glory, serving as stand-ins for the suddenly reviled upper-class. Enterprising promoters who hope to capitalize on today’s economic angst could hardly do better than Money, Inc., although El Bonus Mas Gordo might be a strong draw in his own right.

The sad thing about this strip is that neither of these people appear to be particularly old. The man still has most of his hair and the woman’s skin is still perfectly smooth. Neither of them have bad posture from aching joints and there doesn’t appear to be a bevvy of medications strewn across the table. If anything, the couple in this strip appears to be solidly middle-aged, which to my mind is too young to be worrying about death. They should make a will, bury it in a desk drawer in their oldest child’s house (telling him about it of course) and then go hit the beach.

I used to drink whole milk, but have long since switched to skim (or occasionally two-percent). The taste can be a bit of a shock if you’re used to drinking the heavy stuff, and can certainly seem watery at first. After a while, though, you come to see skim milk as regular milk and enjoy it as a complement to cold cereal or chocolate chip cookies. In fact, I’m sure a glass of whole milk would seem unbelievably rich to me right now – like liquid cheesecake or, as today’s La Cucaracha puts it, water with fat.

It’s the Sunday before Hallowwen, which means the comics page is littered with holiday jokes. But this strip stood out for me by managing to take a hackneyed sentiment (that Sarah Palin would make a scary President) and turn it into something fresh and interesting. The rendering of Palin, for example, is perfectly eerie, what with the “President” sash, sinister grin and lack of pupils. I also like the single-panel format, which usually comes across as lazy in a Sunday strip, but in this case does a nice job of enunciating the outsized horror on the faces of the fleeing characters.

There’s nothing like the image of a clubbed baby seal served insde a flour tortilla to make a person lose their appetite. But while today’s La Cucaracha provoked a reaction with it’s stomach-turning punchline, it also got me thinking about what might pass for quality Mexican food in Gov. Palin’s home state of Alaska. Having never ventured north of Montreal, I’m still going to wager that Alaska’s Mexican cuisine is not up to snuff. That’s okay, I suppose, given that my hometown of Chicago is not known for it’s salmon.

Today was the first day of class at Chicago Public Schools, the gargantuan system that educates (and, more often than not, babysits) students across America’s third-largest city. It was also a day of protest as busloads of students made their way to the affluent suburb of Northfield in an attempt to register for classes at New Trier, a well-funded high school with a history of generating impressive standardized test scores. As a graduate of a magnet high school (a well-heeled, high-performing school within the Chicago Public School system), I can attest to the fact that protest organizers could have made substantially the same point if they had tried to register students at any one of these selective-enrollemnt sites within the city.

I have the utmost respect for Abraham Lincoln, but I’m not sure he can be used as a mouthpiece against warmongering ditties. Have you ever parsed the lyrics to The Battle Hymn of the Republic? Here’s what Honest Abe had our boys singing on the way to Atlanta:

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword
His truth is marching on

The necessity of the Civil War aside, that’s about as peaceful as Bomb, Bomb Iran. The song is eloquent, though, which may have been why Lincoln was attracted to it. Most of his own speeches were written in a similar vein.